Rethinking French Insularities: Marie NDiaye’s Rosie Carpe

Marie NDiaye’s writing occupies a unique position in literary French and Francophone postcolonial time and space. As shown, many biographical elements that are specific to the author’s history reemerge through fictional figures and situations located at the crossroads of sub-Saharan African, metropolitan, and French overseas memories. They are traumatic as well as post-traumatic memories inscribed in the colonial past of France. In this article dedicated to her novel Rosie Carpe, published in 2001 at the dawn of a new century, I contend that these traumatic and post-traumatic experiences and memories have survived the historical process of decolonization and taken the shape of a reality that I explain through the notion of “identity insularities.” These identities are colonial tropes that have persisted in the postcolonial era that is ours. These imaginaries form as many identity islands keeping women and men remote from any form of autonomy. They remain, as unveiled in this novel, under the aegis of a cultural unconscious, of practices of domination and ostracization that have framed a socioeconomic reality of which men of color and women are captives. As uncovered through outbreaks of violence experienced by diverse characters in this novel, the women and men of the postcolonial era depicted by NDiaye are relinquished to the statuses of objects that can be controlled and broken, i.e., mastered. As displayed in this fiction, this centuries-old experience of domination has penetrated psyches, imaginaries, bodies, and territories spanning from metropolitan Ile-de-France to the Caribbean island of Guadeloupe.